Book Scavenger (21 page)

“Matthew,” Emily said. “I need the computer.”

He had the hood up on his sweatshirt. When he didn't respond, she yanked it down, revealing his earbuds plugged in. Matthew turned, yanking out an earbud.

“What's your problem?”

“I need to use the computer.”

“Sorry. I'm on it.”

“Can't you use your phone?”

“Not for this.”

“Matthew, come on. This will be quick.”

“Wait your turn.”

“Fine.” Emily collapsed into the nearby couch. From her vantage point, she could see Matthew putting together another stop-motion video. This new video appeared to be made up of notebook paper drawings that got crumpled and uncrumpled, over and over. And it appeared to be taking him forever to finish. Emily jumped back up.

“I just want to check on one thing,” she said. “It will be quick.”

“Why don't you ask James? I'm sure he can spare one of his dozen computers for your games.” He said
games
as if he'd said
pacifiers
or
tricycles
.

“He doesn't have a dozen computers,” Emily snapped. “Anyway, this isn't your computer. It belongs to everyone.”

“And I'm using it right now.”

Emily was a shaken soda ready to pop. “Why are you always so mean?” she exploded. “You used to be fun. I used to think you were cool!”

Matthew looked at her sideways then back to the screen. “I can take a break.” Matthew saved his work. “I'm hungry anyway.” Matthew got up from the table and went back to the kitchen.

His low-key response to her outburst only made her feel worse. Now he could add “dramatic” and “childish” to the list of reasons he didn't want to hang out with her anymore. Emily pushed thoughts of her brother aside and logged onto Book Scavenger. She selected “San Francisco” and then did a title search for
The Maltese Falcon.

“Whoa.” She straightened in her seat. Fifty-two copies hidden in San Francisco alone. She'd never seen anywhere close to that many copies of one book hidden in a city before. But it was a big city. She did a search for
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
to compare against a typically popular book for hiding. Nine copies. There was definitely something going on with
The Maltese Falcon
.

She went back to those search results and looked under the User column. That showed the name of who had hidden the book, and again Emily was surprised. Three copies were hidden by different people, but the other forty-nine were all hidden by the same person. And not just any Book Scavenger player: Raven.

Emily clicked the message icon and typed “Raven” into the “To” field.

SURLY WOMBAT:
Who are you?

RAVEN:
I do not have the information you seek.

“Yeah, yeah,” Emily said.

SURLY WOMBAT:
Are you running Mr. Griswold's game?

RAVEN:
I do not have the information you seek.

“Okay, fine. Be coy,” Emily muttered. She looked at the list of hidden
Maltese Falcon
s. All of Raven's copies were hidden the week before Emily moved to San Francisco. She already knew from the one turned in to Bayside Press that there was a message of some sort inside—something that made the person who had turned it in think it was Mr. Griswold's game. Finding one of these copies had to be the next step. She looked at the San Francisco map on the Book Scavenger site and narrowed the choices to only show Raven's hidden books, since the forty-nine
Maltese Falcon
s
were the only books Raven had hidden.

Every hidden book was marked with a star on the map, and the closest star to where they lived was in an area called Nob Hill. Out of habit, she almost declared the book so she could get double points, but—thinking of Babbage poaching her books—she pulled her finger back from the mouse right before she clicked. It wasn't like there weren't forty-eight more options to find if she declared this one and someone got to it before her, but Emily didn't want to run the risk of drawing someone's attention to it. Or alerting anyone that she was interested in it, she realized, thinking about those men who must know she's Surly Wombat.

She opened the clue without declaring the book, and it read:
Where he finished writing this
.

“Okay,” Emily muttered to herself and opened a new web browser. She did an Internet search for “Dashiell Hammett” and “Maltese Falcon.” There were almost two hundred thousand results. The top results were mostly about a movie that had been made of the book. She was about to search with different keywords when she saw a link to a map of sites referenced in
The Maltese Falcon
as well as places Dashiell Hammett had lived. She clicked on that. There were only two noted locations in the Nob Hill area. She hovered over one, and a bubble popped up that said,
Dashiell Hammett lived at 1155 Leavenworth Street when he completed the final draft of
The Maltese Falcon
.

She'd figured it out! That was where she had to go. Emily did a victory spin in the computer chair.

She had to tell James. Sure, he was mad, but he'd be interested to know
The Maltese Falcon
clue led somewhere and to hear about Raven's role in the game. He'd probably even want to go with her.

Emily flipped to a clean sheet of notebook paper and, in their secret code, wrote,
Raven hid forty-nine copies of
Maltese Falcon
around San Francisco. One is at 1155 Leavenworth. Next clue!
She went to her room, slid open the window, dropped the paper in the sand pail, and raised the bucket. She stood on a chair and tapped their secret knock on the ceiling with the yardstick/tennis ball contraption. And then she waited. There were no footsteps above, no sliding of James's window. Emily tried the knock again.

Maybe he wasn't in his room. She lowered the pail back down, grabbed the note, ran down her stairs and out the front door to their building's landing, and pounded on the Lees' door. After a few seconds without any noise on the other side, she pounded again and then rang the doorbell. Two locks clicked, a dead bolt slid, and the older Ms. Lee opened the door. Even though James's grandmother was barely taller than Emily and swam in one of James's old Angry Birds shirts, she was still quite intimidating.

“Is your apartment on fire?” she asked.

“Um, no, I…”

“Don't knock so loud unless the apartment is on fire. I am not hard of hearing.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Emily said meekly.

James's grandmother gripped a wooden spoon in one hand and pursed her lips, waiting. For a moment, Emily couldn't remember why she was there.

“I was doing research for a … book report and found something I thought James would be interested in. Is he here?”

“One moment,” Ms. Lee said. Up the staircase she called, “James! Emily is here.”

Emily had expected James to appear, but instead she heard his voice reply in Chinese.

Ms. Lee turned back to Emily, her face softened with an apologetic smile. “He's in the middle of a school project and can't be interrupted. Perhaps later? Or I could show him your research.”

Ms. Lee held out her spoon-free hand.

“That's okay,” Emily said, backing away. She knew James was mad, but he wouldn't even talk to her?

She had left her own front door wide open and walked back through, closing it softly behind her. When she reached the top of her stairs, she found her brother skulking about in the hallway and guessed he might have overheard her conversation with Ms. Lee. She ignored him and was about to enter her bedroom when Matthew said, “Phlegmily. I mean Emily.”

“What?” She didn't bother turning around.

“I have some free time this week. If you want someone to go book scavenging with.”

Emily waited a beat, expecting a punch line or her brother to start laughing and take his words back. When she didn't hear anything, she finally turned. Matthew scratched at the lines he'd shaved into his head and appeared to be studying the baseboards. He glanced up at her once, maybe to check if she was still there.

“Okay,” Emily said. “Thanks.”

 

CHAPTER

29

THE DAY AFTER
her fight with James was the first time in the weeks since starting Booker that Emily felt lost in the big school. Not lost in the can't-find-my-classroom sense, but in the where-do-I-fit-in sense. With every school she'd attended in the past, she'd always started with an identity that pretty much saw her through to the end, whether it was “loner girl with her nose in a book” in New Mexico and Colorado, or “Matthew's little sister” before that. She wasn't always wild about the identity, but it was comfortable to have one and to feel like you knew the role you were supposed to play. At Booker she'd started from day one as James's friend. She didn't know what role to play anymore.

At lunch, it hadn't seemed right to hang out in the library without James, so she went to the cafeteria, which was about as loud as a marching band practicing in a bathroom. She saw Vivian, the girl from her English and social studies classes who'd first introduced herself as their class president. But Vivian was involved in a conversation with the other girls at her table and didn't look her way. Emily continued outside.

Booker had an enormous blacktop where they had recess and PE and lunch. Emily found a stretch along the school building that was empty (other than some pushy seagulls) and leaned against the wall, pulling out
The Maltese Falcon
and her bag lunch.
Hello, loner girl with her nose in a book. Haven't seen you in a while
, she thought.

In Mr. Quisling's class, James and Emily sat turned away from each other. Maddie took one look at them and said, “Uh-oh, things look tense for the clubhouse gang.” She slid into the seat behind James. “Did somebody reveal the secret password to a nonmember?”

“Shut up, Maddie,” James muttered. He was methodically solving another of his logic puzzles and didn't look up. Emily pretended to be too absorbed in doodling a maze onto the margin of her notebook to have paid any attention.

At the start of class, James bent over his backpack and pulled out a handful of long, skinny strips of paper. “I brought a makeup cipher for yesterday,” he announced to Mr. Quisling.

Emily ducked her head to look at Maddie and was pleased to see her gaping. She saw Emily looking at her and snapped her mouth shut. Her eyes were wide and blinking, and it occurred to Emily that Maddie might actually be nervous about losing her bet.

“Did you?” Mr. Quisling accepted the bouquet of strips, extending one to look at the letters written on it. “Interesting, Mr. Lee.” Mr. Quisling gave an approving nod and distributed James's cipher to the class.

Emily looked hers over. It was unlike anything that had been turned in for the challenge so far, and unlike anything she and James had talked about cipher-wise. The strip read:

Emily wondered why the cipher was vertical instead of horizontal. And why were there five sets of two letters, evenly spaced, and then one letter at the bottom? Was the message five different two-letter words and then one one-letter word? Were there even five different two-letter words that could be used to make up a message? She didn't know how to start decoding this—not that she wanted to solve it or would turn in her solution if she figured it out. They might not be talking, but she still wanted James to win his bet with Maddie.

*   *   *

After school, just to be on the safe side with those men, Emily left through a different door from the main one they had walked out of yesterday. She took a different route, too, maybe to avoid running into James as much as to avoid those men if they were to come back. She didn't actually think they would come back, because she'd done something brilliant she was rather proud of. On Book Scavenger, she listed
The Gold-Bug
as hidden in the “Outer Sunset.” She'd picked that neighborhood off a map because it looked about as far from their school as you could get without leaving the city. For the clue, she looked up that old language Maddie had used for the cipher challenge—Ogham—and used it to write out directions to an imaginary bench in a park. If the men were looking for
The Gold-Bug
as James suspected they were, and they were paying attention to what she did on Book Scavenger, then this would lead them on a bit of a wild-goose chase. She just wished James would talk to her so she could tell him they didn't have anything to worry about now.

When Emily walked in the front room of their apartment, she was kind of surprised to see Matthew sprawled on the couch, waiting for her. Even though he had said he'd go book hunting with her after school, she'd half-expected he would bail on her.